David as Goliath

While we certainly shouldn’t discount the fact that Team Carlson’s April Batting champ Matt Kemp has stepped back into the shadows of injury due to a strained hamstring, Team Roberts’ David Wright has taken the full MLB spotlight all to himself with a league-leading .441 batting average and .535 on-base percentage in May and overall season average of .412.  And if you’ve seen recent Mets games – and there have certainly been a few painful ones with a couple walk-off losses in Miami and an out-of-country thrashing at the hand of the Toronto Blue Jays where outfield Canadian fans chanted “who is Baxter” – even if Kemp was still in the May Battling Title race, it seems that Wright still can do no wrong as Matt was hitting only .212 in May when he went down.  The sweet irony here is that Team Roberts picked up David Wright late in both drafts as a number of us baseball fans were weary after a lackluster 2011 season that now appears actually attributable to nagging injuries.  Well, the real David Wright has stood back up at the plate and in the field with only one error on the year and a number of highlight snares and bare-hand throwouts from the third base line.  However, it’s offense that has put the Mets and the Dodgers on major league radars as the two teams are 5th and 8th in team batting average respectively (3rd and 5th in the NL).  Of course, the lingering question is whether or not the Mets will hold onto Wright with all their financial woes and the recent success of their farm system.  In an MLB Network interview, when asked about his future with the Mets, Wright gave the usual answer of safety: “That’s a great question. I hope…I’d love to get this thing turned around and headed in the right direction and I think we’ve done that, taking that first step. Hopefully, I’m a big part of that.”  You’re not just a big part of that Wright, you’re the Goliath part considering that 12 of the Mets’ 22 wins have been of the comeback nature and that the Mets’ pitching has an overall 4.60 ERA that ranks 27th in the majors.

THE WEEK’NESS OF KERSHAW

Speaking of pitching – and despite Wright’s impressive performance – Team Wanzel’s Clayton Kershaw took the “NL Player of the Week” honors this past week after throwing seven scoreless innings with six strikeouts in a Dodgers 3-1 win over the D-Backs last Monday and a shutout last Saturday against the NL Central-leading Cardinals to lower his May ERA to 2.01 on 4 starts.  Kershaw also picked up – or perhaps the right word is “dropped” – his first double of his MLB career against St. Louis that had fellow Team Wanzel player Dee Gordon – recently benched for lackluster performance – jumping off the pine.  Take a look and listen as Clay explains in “chesty” ice-wrap-toga style:

PREMONITIONS FOR A PEG-LEG

A few of the other headlines emerging from the Dodgers’ three-game sweep of the Cardinals at Dodger stadium over the weekend was injury.  On Saturday night at Dodger Stadium, the Cardinals lost Lance Berkman to a torn meniscus that might force him into retirement and – just the Friday night before – Dodgers’ second baseman Mark Ellis had trouble run into him as he tried to turn two and took to the air:

While the MLB video captions is “Ellis shaken up” – and Mark himself wasn’t aware of the extent of the injury at the time as he stayed in the game to bat in the next inning – when he went home the leg swelled up with blood and he headed for the hospital where he received desperately-needed fasciotomy surgery to drain the blood and fluid hat was putting pressure on the muscle in his left leg.  After the surgery the doctors told Ellis that six or seven hours later and Ellis would have lost his leg under such pressure that would ultimately “kill” the muscle.  Mark will be out for at least six weeks and the Dodgers have called up infielder Ivan DeJesus as his replacement.  But this is just a sentence of the injury story of the Mets and the Dodgers.  In fact, between the Mets and the Dodgers there are a total of 15 injured players with 4 of those injuries having implications for ‘Dem Bums’ franchises.  As we know, the Mets’ Pelfrey is out for the season and Jason Bay is just barely beginning baseball rehab activities with a lingering rib injury.  However, the currently “active” Dem Bums franchise players that have gone down in May include Team Talley’s Ruben Tejada who ran for the first time on Saturday after suffering a right quad strain, but Ann still has James Loney for the May Batting Title race.  The real damage is what the injuries have done to Team Kitchen and Team Carlson and their chances for the Batting Title this month.  Team Kitchen’s Josh Thole and Juan Uribe are out due to concussion and recurring wrist issues respectively, and reigning Batting Title holder Team Carlson’s Matt Kemp and Juan Rivera are both limping on quad injuries.  But never fret – especially you Team Carlson – as Chris Capuano is currently the leading arm in the May Pitching Title race with an ERA of 1.77 on three starts (currently undrafted Aaron Harang leads all pitchers with a 1.29 ERA).  Team Carlson’s Capuano pitches Monday night in Arizona against a D-Backs team who are fifth overall in the MLB in strikeouts and the Mets are in Pittsburgh where Team Roberts’ David Wright faces Pirate pitcher Erik Bedard who is 2-5 on the season.

The stats are updated and here’s the latest on the title races.  See you in fantasy-land.

May Pitching Title Race:
1. Team Carlson – Chris Capuano 1.77 ERA/3 GS
2. Team Wanzel – Clayton Kershaw 2.01 ERA/4 GS
3. Team Talley – Ted Lilly 2.49 ERA/4 GS

May Batting Title Race:
1. Team Roberts – David Wright .441 AVG/59 ABs
2. Team Parry – Andre Ethier .354 AVG/65 ABs
3. Team Wanzel – Daniel Murphy .348 AVG/69 ABs

Mutiny on the “Bounty”

While too many mouths are already involved in the “bounty” issues of the NFL–and can we stop pretending to be surprised about such “violence” in the game–and while the Mets’ recent sweep of the rival Phils and Dodgers’ series win over San Francisco are far more apropos headlines for the ‘Dem Bums blogroll, I can’t help but talk to my recent pang of nostalgia in recent baseball highlights taking me back to a youth of “shockumentary” film viewing.  Per usual – let me explain.  As I’m sure many of you have noticed in recent years,  the “high-speed camera instant replay” has taken over sports whether it be your Fox Sports Super Slo-Mo or the Coors Light Freeze Cam.  And while there’s a real thrill to see a “play at the plate” or “double play exchange” at 250,000 frames per second–compared to TV’s normal 30 frames per second–I came out of this past week of sports viewing with an unforeseen consequence of such intensified viewing: a maximizing of the details of the violence of all games.  In fact, I think last week was my most graphic week of “non-violent” (a.k.a not football) sports viewing ever between Joakim Noah’s ankle folding like an envelope, Baron Davis’ knee cap slipping down his leg, Jason Werth’s wrist breaking backwards, Team Kitchen’s Josh Thole getting cleared and concussed at the plate and, of course, Team Talley’s Ruben Tejada’s face plant along the first-base line–all in super slow motion and repeated at a quarter million frames per second.  So while Tony Stewart deadpanned NASCAR–a sport where we all just wait for the crash right?– after Talladega that “[i]f we haven’t crashed at least 50 percent of the field by the end of the race, we need to extend the race until we crash at least 50 percent of these cars because it’s not fair to these fans,” I was watching the “less-violent” game of baseball going “three-wide” with slow-motion violence like this:

Don’t get me wrong, though I cringe – I always look back and was waiting for that infamous game-show host voice from the 1990 Running Man-inspired game Smash T.V. to proclaim: “Total carnage…I love it!”  Now, while most of the “violence” controversy surrounds the NFL–and by no means, in my opinion, should we trivialize or overlook Junior Seau and Dave Duerson’s suicide by gunshots to the chest–but during this time the mass media puritanical and blind-eyed “bounty gate” interrogators interestingly turned their gaze to baseball after a bit of “old school” enforcement.  Look in if you’re young, green and new… look in:

While baseball manager after baseball manager spoke out against Cole’s “welcome to the big leagues” ball–from Mike Scioscia, Jim Leyland to Bud Black–I can’t help but notice that there’s a sweeping sense of denial here that our pleasure is derived from such extraordinary risk and violence within the game.  Our first clue should be the fact that our most popular television shows–even in triple spin-off format–are those that seek the “truth” through a kind of scientific violence of forensic (bodily) invasion and fragmentation (see C.S.I., N.C.I.S, TruTV, Forensic Files, Discovery, etc).  My interest here is that such technological examination and even dissection of trauma and the body–whether it be the collection of a pubic hair from a Miami Beach bikini murder victim for DNA analysis or a super slow-motion replay of a displacing patella of a professional athlete–it is the (truly modern) spectacle of the violent confrontation of the body and technology on eternal loop that exercises our lust for the power of “truth.”  You can just hear David Caruso say as he does the slow remove of his sunglasses: “Total carnage, it’s our truth.”  The irony here, of course, is that when it comes to sports–and especially the clean face of the American baseball tradition–popular media denies (and seems to assume that we want this as well) the violence is at least a part–not the entire reason necessarily–of why we watch (and play) the game.  What this exposure of the violent nature of the games we enjoy actually brings to the fore is not just the violence itself writ large in slow motion HD, but an “ugly” truth of ourselves that is linked to the contradictory nature of the devouring of images themselves, especially those that spill over the lines of our performed ethics and social graces: that the enjoyment of such faces of death should never be admitted in public space.  Whoa, I know, we’ve come a long way… or really, the point is we haven’t.

WOUND CULTURE

You’ve probably been asked why you like sports or, even, why you don’t like sports.  And while the arguments range from an appalling masculinist exhibitionism, a sanitized capitalistic playground to a spirit and tradition of competition, a metaphorical narrative of war and history, or the performance of physical idealism–or even Guy Debord’s reading of sports (and political elections) as one of many “false choices offered by spectacular abundance” that “generates fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities” where “fallacious archaic oppositions” and “regionalisms and racisms” are “revived”–this recent “abundance” of violence caught by the Coors Light Freezecam and yet “denied” illustrates what critic Mark Seltzer calls our “wound culture.”  In a 1997 article for the journal October, Seltzer argues that what such “collective spectacles” of violence–such faces of death–bring about is a “crucial site where private desire and public space cross” that has radically redefined where the social happens (and, I would argue, where the social can be redefined).  To simplify then, the core arguments “against” sports being a representation of the masculinist violence of a capitalist society or “for” sports as being phenomena of social and regional unification and exchange are both to the point and beside the point.  “To” the point because surely we could argue there’s some kind of residue of a historical and oppressive techno-colonial mindset involved in producing a spectacle of mock “war” with such capitalistic priorities (cf. Bryant Gumbel’s calling NBA Commissioner David Stern a “plantation overseer”) and yet “beside” the point because the real issue is how we rationalize and face the “truth” of these private desires in the public sphere.  Sure, one “truth” is that the violence of the gaze is tantamount to the “violence” of the super-slo-mo replay, however how we listen and how we discuss that violence is where the real breaking point lies.  As Dean MacCannel writes, the denial of violence as an aspect of the game we enjoy is one of our “post-capitalist moral fantasies based on a desire to deny the relationship between profit and exploitation” that should remind us how our screens might be that much more graphic, but that doesn’t mean we are willing to see our stone age understanding.

MEANWHILE… BACK ON THE DIAMOND

The drafts are in and May is nearly half gone and we’ve already got some new faces gracing the May Pitching and Batting Title Races.  While Kershaw and Kemp are the perennial favorites in any given month, keep in mind that each race is based upon monthly (not overall) AVG and ERA.  In his two starts so far this month, Team Wanzel’s Clayton Kershaw has been roped for 4 home runs to put a hitch in his chances for back-to-back Pitching Titles and went 0-5 to lose his “fire” with a .280 AVG in May.  All stats, icons and the Title Race standings are up to date as of today May 10th.  The Mets–on a 5-game win streak–are on their way to Miami where Team Reid’s Santana will face Reyes in the new Marlins Stadium tomorrow night as Team Carlson’s Chris Capuano and the Dodgers await a visit from the Rockies to Dodger Stadium.  Enjoy the slow-mo and admit it my friends.

May Pitching Title Race:
1. Team Carlson – Chris Capuano 0.00 ERA/1 GS
2. Team Roberts – R.A. Dickey 1.13 ERA/1GS
3. Team Talley – Ted Lilly 2.25 ERA/2 GS

May Batting Title Race:
1. Team Reid – Andres Torres .367 AVG/30 ABs
2. Team Wanzel – Daniel Murphy .355 AVG/31 ABs
3. Team Roberts – David Wright .345 AVG/29 ABs

April’s Blue Crush

A flat out beast, or, at least that’s the en vogue term for the unreal kind of baseball player that Team Carlson’s Matt Kemp has shown himself to be through April by becoming one of only four MLB players in history who have hit above .400 with at least 10 homes runs and 20 RBIs in a season’s opening month.  To be more precise, Matt has 12 home runs and 25 RBIs with 35 hits on a .417 AVG that leads the MLB and has not only carried the Dodgers to the best record in the National League, but also our own Team Carlson’s first Batting Title of the year.  The only Dem Bums batter even close to Kemp’s history-making April performance was Team Roberts’ David Wright who finished the opening month with a .389 AVG on 72 ABs on a Mets team who is swinging the bat well to start the season with the fifth strongest team-batting average behind only the Rangers, Red Sox, Cardinals, and Yankees.  The only hitters of note that were close to such stars as Kemp and Wright were the Mets’ early call up replacement for injured CF Andre Torres–Kirk Nieuwenhuis–who hit .325 on 80 ABs and Team Kitchen’s Josh Thole who hit .317 on a just-barely-qualifying 63 ABs.  The performance of Nieuwenhuis will make the May draft debates interesting as New York’s Torres recent return from injury hasn’t pushed Kirk out of the starting lineup.  Of course with Jason Bay on the 15-day DL with a rib fracture, there’s some gaps to fill in the Mets’ outfield.  However, the fireworks–and the long balls–have clearly been flying out of Chavez ravine as with every Kemp AB there is a chant of “MVP” and even Matt’s own manager finds him not just “fun” but even “scary” to watch.  Taking a quick look at Kemp’s 10th inning walk-off homer against the Nats during their homestand sweep of Washington, it sure looks like fun to me:

 

CLAY TAKES THE DAYS

After pitching through flu symptoms on his opening day outing and keeping out of the top three of the ERA race through the first half of April, Team Wanzel’s number one pick of Clayton Kershaw ultimately–and perhaps expectedly–paid off in a month where he received his Cy Young Award.  Pitching races in April, of course, are always a bit crazy as chuckers start to get used to the mound and often have inflated statistics–in either direction–due to pitching to only so many batters and based upon whether or not they gave up a big inning.  Perhaps the successful pitching mantra of just staying “consistent” then is exactly what Kershaw did best putting only 7 batters on base on balls and striking out 28 through a qualifying 5 starts to take home the April Pitching Title with a 1.78 ERA.  Clayton is the only pitcher on either the Mets or the Dodgers to hold an ERA under 2 for the month and his closest competitor was New York’s ace of Santana who pitched for a 2.25 ERA on 5 starts for Team Reid.  However, the bigger headlines and flash bulbs for Mets and Dodgers pitching in April was the fact that the Dodgers are second only to the Washington Nationals in AVG. allowed,  the season-ending loss of Mike Pelfrey to Tommy John surgery, and, oh yeah, this one moment where the Dodgers’ closer Javy Guerra nearly lost his face:

Perhaps my favorite moment is when the trainer asks Guerra where the ball hit him and he seems to say, “right here – straight on into my jaw – but it’s no problem.”  I’ve been looking for some sort of welterweight boxing experience for Javy, but haven’t been able to find it.  His title as Dodgers’ closer, however, is definitely taking hits as he as blown two saves already on the season.  Regardless, congrats to Team Wanzel for taking home the first Dem Bums Pitching Title of the season.

A GOOD RECORD (IS GOOD) COMPANY

After the first month is in the books and Team Carlson and Team Wanzel – our resident artists – celebrate their respective titles, the one additional post-April note is the “healthy” winning records for both the Dodgers and the Mets.  While the Dodgers have a pretty strong early handle on the NL West with a 3.5 game lead over San Francisco, the Mets are in third place in the NL East but only a game back of both Washington and Atlanta who have 14 wins as the division front-runners.  Now we can just sit back and see if Kemp can reach is own predicted 50 HRs and 50 stolen bases and if Ike Davis can pull out of the most brutal slump of his young career.  Oh, and then there’s that issue of filling in for Pelfrey… I’ll see you in May and keep your eyes peeled for those May player drafts.  Here’s the April title race results:

APRIL PITCHING TITLE

1) Team Wanzel – Clayton Kershaw (1.78 ERA)
2) Team Reid – Johan Santana (2.25 ERA)
3) Team Kitchen – Chad Billingsley (2.64 ERA)
4) Team Parry – Jonathon Niese (2.81 ERA)
5) Team Carlson – R.A. Dickety (4.45 ERA)
6) Team Talley – Aaron Harang (5.72 ERA)
7) Team Roberts – Dillon Gee (DNQ)

APRIL BATTING TITLE

1) Team Carlson – Matt Kemp (.417 AVG)
2) Team Roberts – David Wright (.389 AVG)
3) Team Kitchen – Josh Thole (.317 AVG)
4) Team Reid – Ruben Tejada (.299 AVG)
5) Team Parry – Andre Ethier (.276 AVG)
6) Team Wanzel – Juan Uribe (.267 AVG)
7) Team Talley – Ike Davis (.185 AVG)